Thorstein Veblen
The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race

The Journal of Race Development, (Clark Univ., Worcester, Mass.), vol. 3, no. 4 
(Apr., 1913), pp. 491-507.
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[491]
THE MUTATION THEORY AND THE BLOND RACE
By Thorstein Veblen, University of Missouri

The theories of racial development by mutation, associated with the name of 
Mendel, when they come to be freely applied to man, must greatly change the 
complexion of many currently debated questions of race - as to origins, 
migrations, dispersion, chronology, cultural derivation and sequence. In some 
respects the new theories should simplify current problems of ethnology, and 
they may even dispense with many analyses and speculations that have seemed of 
great moment in the past.

The main postulate of the Mendelian theories - the stability of type - has 
already done much service in anthropological science, being commonly assumed as 
a matter of course in arguments dealing with the derivation and dispersion of 
races and peoples. It is only by force of this assumption that ethnologists are 
able to identify any given racial stock over intervals of space or time, and so 
to trace the racial affinities of any given people. Question has been 
entertained from time to time as to the racial fixity of given physical traits - 
as, e.g., stature, the cephalic indices, or hair and eye color - but on the 
whole these and other standard marks of race are still accepted as secure 
grounds of identification.(1*) Indeed, without some such assumption any 
ethnological inquiry must degenerate into mere wool-gathering.

But along with this, essentially Mendelian, postulate of the stability of types, 
ethnologists have at the same time habitually accepted the incompatible 
Darwinian doctrine that racial types vary incontinently after a progressive 
fashion, arising through insensible cumulative variations and passing into new 
specific forms by the same method, [492] under the Darwinian rule of the 
selective survival of slight and unstable (non-typical) variations. The effect 
of these two incongruous premises has been to leave discussions of race 
derivation somewhat at loose ends wherever the two postulates cross one another.

If it be assumed, or granted, that racial types are stable, it follows as a 
matter of course that these types or races have not arisen by the cumulative 
acquirement of unstable non-specific traits, but must have originated by 
mutation or by some analogous method, and this view must then find its way into 
anthropology as into the other biological sciences. When such a step is taken an 
extensive revision of questions of race will be unavoidable, and an appreciable 
divergence may then be looked for among speculations on the mutational 
affinities of the several races and cultures.

Among matters so awaiting revision are certain broad questions of derivation and 
ethnography touching the blond race or races of Europe. Much attention, and 
indeed much sentiment, has been spent on this general topic. The questions 
involved are many and diverse, and many of them have been subject of animated 
controversy, without definitive conclusions.

The mutation theories, of course, have immediately to do with the facts of 
biological derivation alone, but when the facts are reviewed in the light of 
these theories it will be found that questions of cultural origins and 
relationship are necessarily drawn into the inquiry. In particular, an inquiry 
into the derivation and distribution of the blond stock will so intimately 
involve questions of the Aryan speech and institutions as to be left incomplete 
without a somewhat detailed attention to this latter range of questions. So much 
so that an inquiry into the advent and early fortunes of the blond stock in 
Europe will fall, by convenience, under two distinct but closely related 
captions: The Origin of the Blond Type, and The Derivation of the Aryan Culture.

(a) It is held, on the one hand, that there is but a single blond race, type or 
stock (Keane, Lapouge, Sergi), and on the other hand that there are several such 
races or types, more or less distinct but presumably related (Deniker, Beddoe, 
and other, especially British, ethnologists). (b) There is no good body of 
evidence going to establish a great antiquity for the blond stock, and there are 
indications, though perhaps inconclusive, that the blond strain, including all 
the blond types, is of relatively late date - unless a Berber (Kabyle) blond 
race is to be accepted in a more unequivocal manner than hitherto. (c) Neither 
is there anything like convincing evidence that this blond strain has come from 
outside of Europe - except, again, for the equivocal Kabyle - or that any blond 
race has ever been widely or permanently distributed outside of its present 
European habitat. (d) The blond race is not found unmixed. In point of pedigree 
all individuals showing the blond traits are hybrids, and the greater number of 
them show their mixed blood in their physical traits. (e) There is no community, 
large or small, made up exclusively of blonds, or nearly so, and there is no 
good evidence available that such an all-blond or virtually all-blond community 
ever has existed, either in historic or prehistoric times. The race appears 
never to have lived in isolation. (f) It occurs in several (perhaps hybrid) 
variants - unless these variants are to be taken (with Deniker) as several 
distinct races. (g) Counting the dolicho-blond as the original type of the race, 
its nearest apparent relative among the races of mankind is the Mediterranean 
(of Sergi), at least in point of physical traits. At the same time the blond 
race, or at least the dolicho-blond type, has never since neolithic times, so 
far as known, extensively and permanently lived in contact with the 
Mediterranean. (h) The various (national) ramifications of the blond stock - or 
rather the various racial mixtures into which an appreciable blond element 
enters - are all, and to all appearance have always been, of Aryan ("Indo-
European," "Indo-Germanic") speech - with the equivocal exception of the Kabyle. 
(i) Yet far the greater number and variety (national and linguistic) of men who 
use the Aryan speech are not prevailingly blond, or even appreciably mixed with 
blond. (j) The blond race, or the peoples with an appreciable blond admixture, 
and particularly the communities [494] in which the dolicho-blond element 
prevails, show little or none of the peculiarly Aryan institutions - 
understanding by that phrase not the known institutions of the ancient Germanic 
peoples, but that range of institutions said by competent philologists to be 
reflected in the primitive Aryan speech. (k) These considerations raise the 
presumption that the blond race was not originally of Aryan speech or of Aryan 
culture, and they also suggest (l) that the Mediterranean, the nearest apparent 
relative of the dolicho-blond, was likewise not originally Aryan.

Accepting the mutation theory, then, for the purpose in hand, and leaving any 
questions of Aryanism on one side for the present, a canvass of the situation so 
outlined may be offered in such bold, crude and summary terms as should be 
admissible in an analysis which aims to be tentative and provisional only. It 
may be conceived that the dolichocephalic blond originated as a mutant of the 
Mediterranean type (which it greatly resembles in its scheme of biometric 
measurements(2*)) probably some time after that race had effected a permanent 
lodgment on the continent of Europe. The Mediterranean stock may be held (Sergi 
and Keane) to have come into Europe from Africa,(3*) whatever its remoter 
derivation may have been. It is, of course, not impossible that the mutation 
which gave rise to the dolicbo-blond may have occurred before the parent stock 
left Africa, or rather before it was shut out of Africa by the submergence of 
the land connection across Sicily, but the probabilities seem to be against such 
a view. The conditions would appear to have been less favorable to a mutation of 
this kind in the African habitat of the parent stock than in Europe, and less 
favorable in Europe during earlier quaternary time than toward the close of the 
glacial period.

The causes which give rise to a variation of type have always been sufficiently 
obscure, whether the origin of species be conceived after the Darwinian or the 
Mendelian fashion, and the mutation theories have hitherto afforded [495] little 
light on that question. Yet the Mendelian postulate that the type is stable 
except for such a mutation as shall establish a new type raises at least the 
presumption that such a mutation will take place only under exceptional 
circumstances, that is to stay, under circumstances so substantially different 
from what the type is best adapted to as to subject it to some degree of 
physiological strain. It is to be presumed that no mutation will supervene so 
long as the conditions of life do not vary materially from what they have been 
during the previous uneventful life-history of the type. Such is the presumption 
apparently involved in the theory and such is also the suggestion afforded by 
the few experimental cases of observed mutation, as, e.g., those studied by De 
Vries.

A considerable climatic change, such as would seriously alter the conditions of 
life either directly or through its effect on the food supply, might be 
conceived to bring on a mutating state in the race; or the like effect might be 
induced by a profound cultural change, particularly any such change in the 
industrial arts as would radically affect the material conditions of life. These 
considerations, mainly speculative it is true, suggest that the dolicho-blond 
mutant could presumably have emerged only at a time when the parent stock was 
exposed to notably novel conditions of life, such as would be presumed (with De 
Vries) to tend to throw the stock into a specifically unstable (mutating) state; 
at the same time these novel conditions of life must also have been specifically 
of such a nature-as to favor the survival and multiplication of this particular 
human type. The climatic tolerance of the dolicho-blond, e.g., is known to be 
exceptionally narrow. Now, it is not known, indeed there is no reason to 
presume, that the Mediterranean race was exposed to such variations of climate 
or of culture before it entered Europe as might be expected to induce a mutating 
state in the stock, and at the same time a mutant gifted with the peculiar 
climatic intolerance of the dolicho-blond would scarcely have survived tinder 
the conditions offered by northern Africa in late quaternary time. But the 
required conditions are had later on in Europe, after the Mediterranean was 
securely at home in that continent.

[496] The whole episode may be conceived to have run off somewhat in the 
following manner. The Mediterranean race is held to have entered Europe in force 
during quaternary time, presumably after the quaternary period was well 
advanced, most likely during the last genial, interglacial period. This race 
then brought the neolithic culture, but without the domestic animals (or 
plants?) that are a characteristic feature of the later neolithic age, and it 
encountered at least the remnants of an older, palaeolithic population. This 
older European population was made up of several racial stocks, some of which 
still persist as obscure and minor elements in the later peoples of Europe. The 
(geologic) date to be assigned this intrusion of the Mediterranean race into 
Europe is of course not, and can perhaps never be, determined with any degree of 
nicety or confidence. But there is a probability that it coincides with the 
recession of the ice-sheet, following one or another of the severer periods of 
glaciations, that occurred before the submergence of the land connection between 
Europe and Africa, over Gibraltar, Sicily, and perhaps Crete. How late in 
quaternary time the final submergence of the Mediterranean basin occurred is 
still a matter of surmise; the intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe 
appears, on archaeological evidence, to have occurred in late quaternary time, 
and in the end this archaeological evidence may help to decide the geologic date 
of the severance of Europe from Africa.

The Mediterranean race seems to have spread easily over the habitable surface of 
Europe and shortly to have grown numerous and taken rank as the chief racial 
element in the neolithic population; which argues that no very considerable 
older population occupied the European continent at the time of the 
Mediterranean invasion; which in turn implies that the fairly large 
(Magdalenian) population of the close of the palaeolithic age was in great part 
destroyed or expelled by the climatic changes that coincided with or immediately 
preceded the advent of the Mediterranean race. The known characteristics of the 
Magdalenian culture indicate a technology, a situation and perhaps a race, 
somewhat closely [497] paralleled by the Eskimo;(4*) which argues that the 
climatic situation before which this Magdalenian race and culture gave way would 
have been that of a genial interglacial period rather than a period of 
glaciation.

During this genial (perhaps sub-tropical) inter-glacial period immediately 
preceding the last great glaciation the Magdalenian stock would presumably find 
Europe climatically untenable, judging by analogy with the Eskimo; whereas the 
Mediterranean stock should have found it an eminently favorable habitat, for 
this race has always succeeded best in a warm-temperate climate. Both the 
extensive northward range of the early neolithic (Mediterranean) settlements and 
the total disappearance of the Magdalenian culture from the European continent 
point to a climatic situation in Europe more favorable to the former race and 
more unwholesome for the latter than the conditions known to have prevailed at 
any time since the last interglacial period, especially in the higher latitudes. 
The indications would seem to be that the whole of Europe, even the Baltic and 
Arctic seaboards, became climatically so fully impossible for the Magdalenian 
race during this interglacial period as to result in its extinction or 
definitive expulsion; for when, in recent times, climatically suitable 
conditions return, on the Arctic seaboard, the culture which takes the place 
that should have been occupied by the Magdalenian is the Finnic (Lapp) - a 
culture unrelated to the Magdalenian either in race or technology, although of 
much the same cultural level and dealing with a material environment of much the 
same character. And this genial interval that was fatal to the Magdalenian was, 
by just so much, favorable to the Mediterranean race.

But glacial conditions presently returned, though with less severity than the 
next preceding glacial period; and roughly coincident with the close of the 
genial interval in Europe the land connection with Africa was cut off by 
submergence, shutting off retreat to the south. How far communication with Asia 
may have been interrupted during [498] the subsequent cold period, by the local 
glaciation of the Caucasus, Elburz and Armenian highlands, is for the present 
apparently not to be determined, although it is to be presumed that the outlet 
to the east would at least be seriously obstructed during the glaciation. There 
would then be left available for occupation, mainly by the Mediterranean race, 
central and southern Europe together with the islands, notably Sicily and Crete, 
left over as remnants of the earlier continuous land between Europe and Africa. 
The southern extensions of the mainland, and more particularly the islands, 
would still afford a favorable place for the Mediterranean race and its cultural 
growth. So that the early phases of the great Cretan (Aegean) civilisation are 
presumably to be assigned to this period that is covered by the last advance of 
the ice in northern Europe. But the greater portion of the land area so left 
accessible to the Mediterranean race, in central or even in southern Europe, 
would have been under glacial or subglacial climatic conditions. For this race, 
essentially native to a warm climate, this situation on the European mainland 
would be sufficiently novel and trying, particularly throughout that ice-fringed 
range of country where they would be exposed to such cold and damp as this race 
has never easily tolerated.

The situation so outlined would afford such a condition of physiological strain 
as might be conceived to throw the stock into a specifically unstable state and 
so bring on a phase of mutation. At the same time this situation, climatic and 
technological, would be notably favorable to the survival and propagation of a 
type gifted with all the peculiar capacities and limitations of the dolicho-
blond; so that any mutant showing the traits characteristic of that type would 
then have had an eminently favorable chance of survival. Indeed, it is doubtful, 
in the present state of the available evidence, whether such a type of man could 
have survived in Europe from or over any period of quaternary time prior to the 
last period of glaciation. The last preceding interglacial period appears to 
have been of a sufficiently genial (perhaps sub-tropical) character throughout 
Europe to have definitively eliminated the Magdalenian race [499] and culture, 
and a variation of climate in the genial sense sufficiently pronounced to make 
Europe absolutely untenable for the Magdalenian - presumed to be something of a 
counterpart to the Eskimo both in race and culture - should probably have 
reached the limit of tolerance for the dolicho-blond as well. The latter is 
doubtless not as intolerant of a genial – warm-temperate - climate as the 
former, but the dolicho-blond after all stands much nearer to the Eskimo in this 
matter of climatic tolerance than to either of the two chief European stocks 
with which it is associated. Apparently no racial stock with a climatic 
tolerance approximately like that of the Eskimo, the Magdalenian, or the current 
races of the Arctic seaboard, survived over the last inter-glacial period; and 
if the dolicho-blond is conceived to have lived through that period it would 
appear to have been by a precariously narrow margin. So that, on one ground and 
another, the mutation out of which the dolicho-blond has arisen is presumably to 
be assigned to the latest period of glaciation in Europe, and with -some 
probability to the time when the latest glaciation was at its maximum, and to 
the region where glacial and seaboard influences combined to give that racial 
type a differential advantage over all others.

This dolicho-blond mutation may, of course, have occurred only once, in a single 
individual, but it should seem more probable, in the light of De Vries' 
experiments, that the mutation will have been repeated in the same specific form 
in several individuals in the same general locality and in the same general 
period of time. Indeed, it would seem highly probably that several typically 
distinct mutations will have occurred, repeatedly, at roughly the same period 
and in the same region, giving rise to several new types, some of which, 
including the dolicho-blond, will have survived. Many, presumably the greater 
number, of these mutant types will have disappeared, selectively, being unfit to 
survive under those sub-glacial seaboard conditions that were eminently 
favorable to the dolicho-blond; while other mutants arising out of the same 
mutating period and adapted [500] to climatic conditions of a more continental 
character, suitable to more of a continental habitat, less humid, at a higher 
altitude and with a wider seasonal variation of temperature, may have survived 
in the regions farther inland, particularly eastward of the selectively defined 
habitat of the dolicho-blond. These latter may have given rise to several blond 
races, such as are spoken for by Deniker (5*) and certain British ethnologists.

The same period of mutation may well have given rise also to one or more brunet 
types, some of which may have survived. But if any new brunet type has come up 
within a period so recent as this implies, the fact has not been noted or 
surmised hitherto - unless the brunet races spoken for by Deniker are to be 
accepted as typically distinct and referred to such an origin. The evidence for 
the brunet stocks has not been canvassed with a question of this kind in view. 
These stocks have not been subject of such eager controversy as the dolicho-
blond, and the attention given them has been correspondingly less. The case of 
the blond is unique in respect of the attention spent on questions of its 
derivation and prehistory, and it is also singular in respect of the facility 
with which it can be isolated for the purposes of such an inquiry. This large 
and persistent attention, from all sorts of ethnologists, has brought the 
evidence bearing on the dolicho-blond into such shape as to permit more 
confident generalizations regarding that race than any other.

In any case the number of mutant individuals, whether of one or of several 
specific types, will have been very few as compared with the numbers of the 
parent stock from which they diverged, even if they may have been somewhat 
numerous as counted absolutely, and the survivors whose offspring produced a 
permanent effect on the European peoples will have been fewer still. It results 
that these surviving mutants will not have been isolated from the parent stock, 
and so could not breed in isolation, but must forthwith be crossed on the parent 
stock and could therefore [501] yield none but hybrid offspring. From the 
outset, therefore, the community or communities in which the blond mutants were 
propagated would be made up of a mixture of blond and brunet, with the brunet 
greatly preponderating. It may be added that in all probability there were also 
present in this community from the start one or more minor brunet elements 
besides the predominant Mediterranean, and that at least shortly after the close 
of the glacial period the new brachycephalic brunet (Alpine) race comes into the 
case; so that the chances favor an early and persistent crossing of the dolicho-
blond with more than one brunet type, and hence they favor complications and 
confusion of types from the start. It follows that, in point of pedigree, 
according to this view there neither is nor ever has been a pure-bred dolicho-
blond individual since the putative original mutant with which the type came in. 
But tinder the Mendelian rule of hybrids it is none the less to be expected 
that, in the course of time and of climatically selective breeding, individuals 
(perhaps in appreciable numbers) will have come up from time to time showing the 
type characters unmixed and unweakened, and effectively pure-bred in point of 
heredity. Indeed, such individuals, effectively pure-bred or tending to the 
establishment of a pure line, will probably have emerged somewhat frequently 
under conditions favorable to the pure type. The selective action of the 
conditions of life in the habitat most favorable to the propagation of the 
dolicho-blond has worked in a rough and uncertain way toward the establishment, 
in parts of the Baltic and North Sea region, of communities made up prevailingly 
of blonds. Yet none of these communities most favorably placed for a selective 
breeding in the direction of a pure dolicho-blond population have gone far 
enough in that direction to allow it safely to be said that the composite 
population of any such given locality is more than half blond.

Placed as it is in a community of nations made up of a hybrid mixture of several 
racial stocks there is probably no way at present of reaching a convincing 
demonstration of the typical originality of this dolicho-bland mutant, as 
contrasted with the other blond types with which it is associated [502] in the 
European population; but certain general considerations go decidedly, perhaps 
decisively, to enforce such a view: (a) This type shows such a pervasive 
resemblance to a single one of the known older and more widely distributed types 
of man (the Mediterranean) as to suggest descent by mutation from this one 
rather than derivation by crossing of any two or more known types. The like can 
not be said of the other blond types, all and several of which may plausibly be 
explained as hybrids of known types. They have the appearance of blends, or 
rather of biometrical compromises, between two or more existing varieties of 
man. Whereas it does not seem feasible to explain the dolicho-blond as such a 
blend or compromise between any known racial types. (b) The dolicho-blond 
occurs, in a way, centrally to the other blond types, giving them a suggestive 
look of being ramifications of the blond stock, by hybridization, into regions 
not wholly suited to the typical blond. The like can scarcely be said for any of 
the other European types or races. The most plausible exception would be 
Deniker's East-European or Oriental race, Beddce's Saxon, which stands in a 
somewhat analogous spacial relation to the other blond types. But this 
brachycephalic blond is not subject to the same sharp climatic limitations that 
hedge about the dolicho-blond; it occurs apparently with equally secure 
viability within the littoral home area of the dolicho-blond and in continental 
situations where conditions of altitude and genial climate would bar the latter 
from permanent settlement. The ancient and conventionally accepted center of 
diffusion of blondness in Europe lies within the seaboard region bordering on 
the south Baltic, the North Sea and the narrow waters of the Scandinavian 
peninsulas. Probably, if this broad central area of diffusion were to be 
narrowed down to a particular spot, the consensus of opinion as to where the 
narrower area of characteristic blondness is to be looked for, would converge on 
the lands immediately about the narrow Scandinavian waters. This would seem to 
hold true for historic and for prehistoric times alike. This region is at the 
same time, by common consent, the peculiar home of the [503] dolicho-blond, 
rather than of any other blond type. (c) The well known but little discussed 
climatic limitation of the blond race applies particularly to the dolicho-blond, 
and only in a pronouncedly slighter degree to the other blond types. The 
dolicho-blond is subject to a strict regional limitation, the other blond types 
to a much less definite and wider limitation of the same kind. Hence these 
others are distributed somewhat widely, over regions often remote and 
climatically different from the home area of the dolicho-blond, giving them the 
appearance of being dispersed outward from this home area as hybrid extensions 
of the central and typical blond stock. A further and equally characteristic 
feature of this selective localization of the dolicho-blond race is the fact 
that while this race does not succeed permanently outside the seaboard region of 
the south Baltic and North Sea, there is no similar selective bar against other 
races intruding into this region. Although the dolicho-blond perhaps succeeds 
better within its home area than any other competing stock or type, yet several 
other types of man succeed so well within the same region as to hold it, and 
apparently always to have held it, in joint tenancy with the dolicho-blond.

A close relationship, amounting to varietal identity, of the Kabyle with the 
dolicho-blond has been spoken for by Keane and by other ethnologists. But the 
very different climatic tolerance of the two races should put such an identity 
out of the question. The Kabyle lives and thrives best, where his permanent home 
area has always been, in a high and dry country, sufficiently remote from the 
sea to make it a continental rather than a littoral habitat. The dolicho-blond, 
according to all available evidence, can live in the long run only in a seaboard 
habitat, damp and cool, at a high latitude and low altitude. There is no known 
instance of this race having gone out from its home area on the northern 
seaboard into such a region as that inhabited by the Kabyle and having survived 
for an appreciable number of generations. That this type of man should have come 
from Mauritania, where it could apparently not live under the conditions known 
to have prevailed there in the [504] recent or the remoter past, would seem to 
be a biologic impossibility. Hitherto, when the dolicho-blond has migrated into 
such or a similar habitat it has not adapted itself to the new climatic 
requirements but has presently disappeared off the face of the land. Indeed, the 
experiment has been tried in Mauritanian territory. If the Kabyle blond is to be 
correlated with those of Europe, it will in all probability have to be assigned 
an independent origin, to be derived from an earlier mutation of the same 
Mediterranean stock to which the dolicho-blond is to be traced.

Questions of race in Europe are greatly obscured by the prevalence of hybrid 
types having more or less fixity and being more or less distinctly localized. 
The existing European peoples are hybrid mixtures of two or more racial stocks. 
The further fact is sufficiently obvious, though it has received less critical 
attention than might be, that these several hybrid populations have in the 
course of time given rise to a number of distinct national and local types, 
differing characteristically from one another and having acquired a degree of 
permanence, such as to simulate racial characters and show well marked national 
and local traits in point of physiognomy and temperament. Presumably, these 
national and local types of physique and temperament are hybrid types that have 
been selectively bred into these characteristic forms in adaptation to the 
peculiar circumstances of environment and culture under which each particular 
local population is required to live, and that have been so fixed 
(provisionally) by selective breeding of the hybrid material subject to such 
locally uniform conditions -except so far as the local characters in question 
are of the nature of habits and are themselves therefore to be classed as an 
institutional element rather than as characteristics of race.

It is evident that under the Mendelian law of hybridization the range of 
favorable, or viable, variations in any hybrid population must be very large - 
much larger than the range of fluctuating (non-typical) variations obtainable 
under any circumstances in a pure-bred race. It also follows from these same 
laws of hybridization that by virtue of the [505] mutual exclusiveness of 
allelomorphic characters or groups of characters it is possible selectively to 
obtain an effectually "pure line" of hybrids combining characters drawn from 
each of the two or more parent stocks engaged, and that such a composite pure 
line may selectively be brought to a provisional fixity(6*) in any such hybrid 
population. And under conditions favorable to a type endowed with any given 
hybrid combination of characters so worked out the given hybrid type (composite 
pure line) may function in the racial mixture in which it is so placed very much 
as an actual racial type would behave under analogous circumstances; so that, 
e.g., under continued intercrossing such a hybrid population would tend 
cumulatively to breed true to this provisionally stable hybrid type, rather than 
to the actual racial type represented by any one of the parent stocks of which 
the hybrid population is ultimately made up, unless the local conditions should 
selectively favor one or another of these ultimate racial types. Evidently, too, 
the number of such provisionally stable composite pure lines that may be drawn 
from any hybrid mixture of two or more parent stocks must be very considerable - 
indeed virtually unlimited; so that on this ground there should be room for any 
conceivable number of provisionally stable national or local types of physique 
and temperament, limited only by the number of characteristically 
distinguishable local environments or situations that might each selectively act 
to characterize and establish a locally characteristic composite pure line; each 
answering to the selective exigencies of the habitat and cultural environment in 
which it is placed, and each responding to these exigencies in much the same 
fashion as would an actual racial type - provided only that this provisionally 
stable composite pure line is not crossed on pure-bred individuals of either of 
the parent stocks from which it is drawn, pure-bred in respect of the 
allelomorphic characters which give the hybrid type its typical traits.

When the hybrid type is so crossed back on one or other of its parent stocks it 
should be expected to break down; [506] but in so slow-breeding a species as 
man, with so large a complement of unit characters (some 4000 it has been 
estimated), it will be difficult to decide empirically which of the two lines - 
the hybrid or the parent stock - proves itself in the offspring effectively to 
be a racial type; that is to say, which of the two (or more) proves to be an 
ultimately stable type arisen by a Mendelian mutation, and which is a 
provisionally stable composite pure line selectively derived from a cross. The 
inquiry at this point, therefore, will apparently have to content itself with 
arguments of probability drawn from the varying behavior of the existing hybrid 
types under diverse conditions of life.

Such general consideration of the behavior of the blond types of Europe, other 
than the dolicho-blond, and more particularly consideration of their viability 
under divergent climatic conditions, should apparently incline to the view that 
they are hybrid types, of the nature of provisionally stable composite pure 
lines.

So far, therefore, as the evidence has yet been canvassed, it seems probable on 
the whole that the dolicho-blond is the only survivor from among the several 
mutants that may have arisen out of this presumed mutating period; that the 
other existing blond types, as well as certain brunets, are derivatives of the 
hybrid offspring of the dolicho-blond crossed on the parent Mediterranean stock 
or on other brunet stocks with which the race has been in contact early or late; 
and that several of these hybrid lines have in the course of time selectively 
been established as provisionally stable types (composite pure lines), breakable 
only by a fresh cross with one or other of the parent types from which the 
hybrid line sprang, according to the Mendelian rule.(7*)

All these considerations may not be convincing, but they are at least suggestive 
to the effect that if originality is to [507] be claimed for any one of the 
blond types or stocks it can best be claimed for the dolicho-blond, while the 
other blond types may better be accounted for as the outcome of the crossing of 
this stock on one or another of the brunet stocks of Europe.


NOTES:
1) Cf., however, W. Ridgeway, "The Application of Zoölogical Laws to Man," 
Report, British Association for Advancement of Science (Dublin), 1908.
2) Cf. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, ch. xi, xiii.
3) Sergi, Arii e Italici; Keane, Man Past and Present, ch. xii.
4) Cf. W. J. Sollas, " Palaeolithic Races and their Modern Representatives," 
Science Progress, vol. iv, 1909-1910.
5) The Races of Mankind; and "Les six races composant la population de l' 
Europe," Journal Anth. Inst., 1906.
6) Illustrated by the various pure breeds or "races" of domestic animals.
7) Mr. R. B. Bean's discussion of Deniker's "Six Races," e. g., goes far to show 
that such is probably the standing of the blond types, other than the dolicho-
blond, among these six races of Europe; although such is not the conclusion to 
which Mr. Bean comes. Philippine Journal of Science, September, 1909.
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